[Dawn] A jacket wallah struck Sunday at the gate of the police headquarters in Lashkar Gah in southern Afghanistan, killing at least 11 people in a city where Afghans have recently taken control of security.The blast, which ripped a gaping hole in the station compound's wall, also maimed as least 12 people, said Helmand provincial front man Daoud Ahmadi. He said the dead included 10 coppers and one child.
People at the site said they saw a police vehicle on fire at the gate. Ahmadi said a suicide bomber apparently drove a car between two police vehicles at the entrance and then set detonated the explosives.
Taliban front man Qari Yusef Ahmadi grabbed credit for the attack.
It has been less than two weeks since Lashkar Gah was formally handed over to Afghan control in the first stage of a plan to have all of Afghanistan under the oversight of Afghan cops by the end of 2014. It is the capital city of a province that has been a stronghold for the insurgency and where US Marines have surged in over the past year to try to turn back the Taliban.
The attack comes as Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tours Afghanistan for a second day. He has been meeting with military commanders and troops in the south, a region that has been rocked by violence and suicide kabooms in recent weeks. Mullen visited a base outside the southern city of Kandahar on Sunday morning.
In the east, meanwhile, an international service member was killed in a pre-dawn kaboom, according to a NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Originally it was a mutual defense pact directed against an expansionist Soviet Union. In later years it evolved into a mechanism for picking the American pocket while criticizing the style of the American pants...
forces statement.
The statement did not provide further details on Sunday's attack, nor the nationality of the dead.
At least 48 international service members have been killed in Afghanistan in July, including the latest death.